- Home /
- Archives /
- Vol 3 No 1 (2009) /
- Articles
This article discusses recent changes in Catholic festivities, especially the system of fiestas in rural Mexico. The ethnographic focus of the discussion is on indigenous Zapotec communities of the State of Oaxaca. Collective religious practices in Mexican villages contribute to social cohesion. Fiestas commemorating patron saints of the villages play a particularly important role in (re)constructing communal identity and the feeling of collective belongingness. Various global processes like secularisation, integration of local economies into the capitalist market system, increasing out-migration from villages, and the rise of Protestantism have undermined the position of the Catholic Church in the region. The article scrutinises the changing organisation and role of fiestas in the communities, concluding that the impact of secularisation, migration and Protestantism in particular is not simple and always negative – these changes can actually invigorate certain dimensions of the fiestas. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the author(s) and users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) under the following conditions: 1. they must attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor, 2. they may not use this contribution for commercial purposes, 3. they may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
Authors retain the following rights:
– copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the article, such as patent rights,
– the right to use the substance of the article in future own works, including lectures and books,
– the right to reproduce the article for own purposes, provided the copies are not offered for sale,
– the right to self-archive the article.